


Gnossienne

by Eglentyne



Category: Kuroshitsuji | Black Butler
Genre: Because everything I make is super, Gen, I don't know how to tag something not shippy, No kink this time around, Psychological Drama, Read it anyway
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-21
Updated: 2015-12-21
Packaged: 2018-05-08 03:58:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,152
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5482475
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Eglentyne/pseuds/Eglentyne
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ciel, at the age of ten, struggles with knowing.  As the title suggests, it’s an experimental piece, with some deeply psychological undercurrents.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Gnossienne

**Author's Note:**

  * In response to a prompt by Anonymous in the [23emotions](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/23emotions) collection. 



> **Prompt:**
> 
>  
> 
> gnossienne - n. a moment of awareness that someone you’ve known for years still has a private and mysterious inner life, and somewhere in the hallways of their personality is a door locked from the inside, a stairway leading to a wing of the house that you’ve never fully explored—an unfinished attic that will remain maddeningly unknowable to you, because ultimately neither of you has a map, or a master key, or any way of knowing exactly where you stand.
> 
> http://www.dictionaryofobscuresorrows.com/post/52093177832/gnossienne-3-by-reader-karin-josephine

I wake up from that feeling of being dropped from a very high place. Chances are that my screams erupt from me before I’m ever fully awake. The tears on my face make the horror feel like it has happened all over again. The darkness in the bedroom is so dense that I can’t make sense of space so it feels right to ball myself under the coverlet to establish some boundary, however powerless it may be.

Waiting for the light to come and to hear the sound of the door opening has me cry harder, but I’ve learned that counting the seconds make it less scary. Fourteen seconds later, I gulp down my sobs.

“Young master, did you have another nightmare?”

Peeking from under covers twisted around me, a shadowed figure bends over me. He smells my fear, which is why I have to rub my eyes and pretend I am not afraid of the dark.

“You are safe,” he says and I have to remind myself that he can’t tell lies, but I’m still not convinced.

“Tell me a story.” I peer at him through my one good eye, my face half-buried in the pillows.

After setting the candelabra on the bedside table he pulls up a chair. The lights flicker over his features that look recognisable to me in some way, his brow, the bridge of his nose, his jawline, and yet their cold rigidness makes them unfamiliar again. His eyes shine with a similar severity, like the glass ones of some Roman statue set into flesh. For a moment he stares into the dark, a faraway look of recall before he begins speaking.

The most foreign aspect to him is that voice, for his enunciation is as precise as every other action he performs. He speaks in some lilting manner, with rolling peaks and dips to how he forms phrases and sentences. I care less for what he is saying, but rather listen to the instrument of his voice of which only he knows how to play. Even if he speaks simple fairy tales, it is his voice that carries some forgotten song of wild hunts and misty worlds in the shadow of ancient forests.

Perhaps he was there, in some ancient time, but I would not know for certain, for my butler never speaks of those things. In quiet moments and dark spaces I find a hint of unknowable timelessness. It is in the structured hours of day light he compacts himself into something unerringly present.

The manner in which he has every moment of every hour organised forces each day to feel like the next. I never need to listen to the chimes of the clocks, for I know the hour by what my butler has set for me at any given time. For months I dance this coordinated routine, every day attempting some new scheme to disrupt it. I never can.

This devil comports himself with frightening immediacy. He not so much enters a room as he appears in it. Even as I watch him open a door his walking into the room seems to follow his awareness of how he already occupies it. His presence causes the air about me to tremble and it is then that I feel an awareness of myself. When he leaves, the atmosphere of a place settles to an uncanny stillness and I find myself questioning his permanence.

It drives me to such a level of frustration, how his movements revolve around catering to me, and yet anything beyond that role seems an illusion. Affecting his stoic disposition seems as foolish as attempting to topple a brick façade just by blowing upon it. How is it that something so impenetrable can feel so unfixed? I need to understand it, to make him something real.

I sneak away to the servant’s hall with the key to his quarters. After unlocking the door I stare into a room unchanged since the day I assigned it to him and wonder why he even bothers to lock his bedroom at all.

The white walls bear no picture or ornament. The bed knows not a night of occupation. The writing desk does not tell of whether a note has ever been penned over its surface. Neither can I find a scuff on the floor, nor a spot of dew in the water pitcher, nor a speck of dust on the mantle.

Opening the wardrobe, jackets and trousers hang in uniform attention. I reach into a drawer to finger one of his shirts and see no ring on the collar. Another drawer contains rolled up ties, and pairs of gloves, the thumbs pressed over the palms. Not a trace of blood or silver polish stains evidence of any history into these objects.

I smell wood varnish. The back of my neck begins to tingle.

“Young master?”

He stands tall, black and imposing against a backdrop of bare wall and I can almost see this vapour curling around him, like some distortion in the ether.

“Do you have a reason for rummaging through my effects?”

That ever-dutiful servant holds a can of varnish in one hand and a polishing cloth in another. The smell gives me some reminder that there is still air to breathe. I gauge his distance from me, for even if he stands but a step into the room, I could swear he had stood just behind me. Even though my eyes register that he is limited to some bodily containment, his presence seems to exist as far as his senses can reach. He might have heard the creaking of the floor boards under me, might have smelled the remnant of mint jam and honey on my breath.

A cutting inhale grants me my voice once more. “They’re technically not your effects, they are property I grant you use of. I can rummage anywhere I please.”

When he lowers his gaze I dare to look at his smug expression. “Of course, sir. You are here as is your right to be. May I venture to ask what has you so curious?”

No matter how I try, he always sees right though my brick walls, into the tallest towers of my motives.

“I never said I was curious.”

“You did not have to.”

The damned devil does not bear his weight from one foot to the other and his rigid pose makes him all the more unsettling. I need a way to disturb it. Flinging open the wardrobe once more I grab the hangers laden with pressed trousers and jackets. With a violent hurtle they clatter to the floorboards and the sound pleases me. Seeing the fabric wrinkled at my feet pleases me too.

I want him to express some level of indignation or modicum of concern. Instead he sets down the polish on the table next to the washbasin to place his hands at his sides. He looks at the piles of clothing on the floor, then back at me with an unreadable expression.

I pull out the drawers and snatch up socks, ties, shirt stays, gloves, intimates to add to the heap. Soon no more contents in the wardrobe remain. My heart pounds, my hands twitch, and I want some other thing to set wrong but at this point his unaffected demeanour has me unsettled.

“Yes, I believe all the property you have granted me is accounted for, save for what I am wearing currently… unless you wish me to bestow that to the floor as well.”

“You can keep your bleeding shirt on!”

“Much obliged, master.”

I storm out of the room.

My butler carries no personal effects, no trinkets linked to a memory, no memento or keepsake to divulge a sliver of personality or history. There is no means for me to define him as one defines a person, because he isn’t a person. The descriptions of the monsters in those fairy tales feel too ill-fitting for this being that makes me uncomfortably aware of my own smallness. Yet at the same time he is too immense to be real.

I need to find some boundary to him, an edge that will grant him real definition. Discovering some means to pull a reaction from him felt more real than anything in my fabricated little kingdom.

While sitting at my desk I have a careless slip with the letter opener, and slice across my index finger. I yell more in surprise than in actual pain. My butler who was readying to push the tea trolley back to the kitchen whirls around at my outburst and I swear I feel the air snap from it. In an instant he is kneeling beside me, taking my cut hand into his gloved ones.

“It’s nothing.” I murmur.

“So it will only take but a minute to clean and bandage, young master.”

I know not to argue with him. I would rather watch the blood turn a deeper red and slide down my hand until the cut exhausts itself. Instead, the butler directs me to the washroom, and pulls out a medicine box. As he works, his attention focuses like a beam of light through a magnifying glass, and he feels more contained, like something I can touch. He shows concern when red continues to bloom like an offensive weed on the surface, no matter how many times he tries to blot it away. His brows arch when he presses the swab of iodine to the cut and watches me flinch and hiss. He seems smug when his bandage is secure over my finger. All these emotions to unfold over a simple drama, and I know he can’t be some emotionless beast, not when he smiles and says, “All better, my lord.”

He returns to his schedule for the day, and I to my studies, but the bandage remains as a reminder of his attention to me. Being clothed and bathed and fed by him cannot have the same effect when performed in unwavering routine, but this slight hiccup in the planned events of the day feels significant to me in some uncanny way. So I begin imagining other ways I can receive his attention.

It’s not in my nature to be a clumsy fool, for I learned at a young age to take precaution of my limitations. My young childhood gave me little opportunity to be reckless, so I learned to be weary of causing myself injury. Though my accidents are really premeditated, that cursed devil possesses some miraculous ability to predict my actions and prevent me from inflicting any real harm.

I stand at the stair landing, probably for five whole minutes, considering just how much it would hurt if I were to throw myself down it. This can result in some terrible damage, like a concussion or a broken bone or some other factor I can’t predict. Standing at the top of the stair isn’t giving me any motivation, so I decide giving myself a running start will have better results.

At the edge of that top stair I falter, and as I lose my footing I recognise I had made some grave mistake. I can’t grab hold of the banister in time, and I brace for the impending fall.

It doesn’t come.

Some jerking motion forces my eyes open and there he is, balanced at some inhuman angle over the stairs and having caught me almost upside down before my back could land on the uneven surface. His immediate arrival knocks the wind from me, almost as jarring as a blow to the stomach. The devil cradles me into his chest in one arm, the back of my neck in the other.

He straightens up with me huddled against him. As his footfalls clack down the stairs he looks none too amused, and I really do feel like an idiot child, just as his condescending glare indicates. With each footfall I bounce in his embrace and it reminds me of some distant time when I used to be held like this, being carried down the stair because _he_ thought me too small to do it myself.

Stupid is how I feel when my throat constricts, foolish when my face goes hot trying to hold back tears. I sniff, and put my arms around the devil’s neck, burying my face so he won’t have to see me struggle. I smell vanilla extract, and cinnamon, and some undercurrent that reminds me of how the air tastes during a cold snap in the fall. Real, this is my life, cold and biting and impossible to swallow. The sobs rush upon his shoulder, and I feel sick.

He stops at the middle of the stair and I sense he is searching for the source of the hurt so he can mend it. I try to pull my face away but he keeps a firm grip on the back of my neck and I can’t squirm from it.

“Everything is fine, young master.” But it isn’t, and that sobbing hurts. “You are unharmed... please...” he sounds uncertain about that, and so I cling to him tighter, holding to my safe guard that is my eventual ruin and that is when the wailing starts. I think back to that last time I felt pathetic and powerless, how it culminated to a rage beyond all sense of myself and I howl because I still feel trapped in that cage, unable to comprehend my deplorable circumstance.

My butler carries me to a tucked away drawing room in a darker part of the house. He doesn’t deposit me onto the settee but rather sits and places me in his lap, my legs spread over the cushions, and he rocks, and rocks, forcing my face in his neck and holds tight to my shoulders. Even this play at nurturing has no gentleness to it, just fierce sentiment that I should get over my spell as quickly as possible. His movements seem practised, like he knows the steps of comfort but understands not the concept itself.

My breathing relaxes again, and I come to some mortified realisation that I had been crying into that small place just below the ear where the jaw meets the neck, his bare skin. It is damp, his hairline dewy, wet with my tears and dripping nose. He seems not at all phased by it and pulls away the eye patch to dry my hidden eye.

He hums with that eerie song-speech. “All right, you have my attention. There was never any need to hurt yourself in order to receive it. So what has you so troubled?”

I have no words to say what I feel, because the emotions tangle in my head and my chest. He looks at me with a soft-lidded expression and brings a handkerchief to my face. Once more he proves my transparency, and how I so wish something could catch him off balance and force him to falter.

“Are you even real?” As I say the words they feel inane, the sort of question that sounded profound in my head but loses it when given air to travel through. What made the question sound even more stupid to me was the acute awareness I had for his lap under me, his arms still around me and I develop the sudden urge to not be so contained within him.

“Of course, as real as you and everything else.”

“Not like everything else.”

“Oh, so you wish to know how I am not like everything else. But you already know the answer to that, young lord.”

“You know that’s not what I mean!” I try to unravel myself from his grip. I want to be angry at him, but I am angrier at myself for not even understanding what it is I want from him. “Who are you?”

“I am your butler—”

“No! I mean apart from any role you serve for me!” That is what I want to say, that profound distinction, so I scream it again. “Not a demon, not a butler, _you!_ ”

My bellowing seems to echo off of him, as impenetrable as the walls that surround us. Just as his arms serve as some unmoveable protection and rampart. Considering the ancient stories he tells me almost every night when I wake from frightful dreams, I think of those fantastic characters and how even they are defined by some origin, a beginning. I think of my own origin, how the proof of my being was reality but months ago and yet that past feels worlds away from me. The bridge of his nose feels timeless, just as the way his hair falls over his forehead, but the surface of his skin is too featureless to be human.

I blurt out the one question that makes sense to me, a clear factor that can define a person. “Did you once have a father as well?”

For the first time his eyes no longer reflect the surface of my own rage and despair and loss, but appear fathomless, a chasm in which one could fall forever and never find the bottom. His presses his arms about me tighter as though to convince himself they are not of hard earth, but are built of flesh and bone. I touch the place where I had been crying, warm skin, and he tenses.

“I did. It was a very, very long time ago,” he whispers.

What would that do, if someone were given all the time of existence to ponder such a complete separation from their origin? I can’t know that grief, not even if I had a lifetime to try. I am not even certain for the length of time I have bought with this contract, but surely it will be long enough to serve its purpose and end before it becomes too torturous. That limitation snaps my awareness into perspective.

He grasps at my cheek with that gloved hand, the side of my face beyond my periphery, even without the eye patch. How his thumb strokes under my eye feels reverent. He speaks with poetic euphony, as though meaning hides between the pauses of his words.

“My child of earth and the starry heavens, you are my means to remember what it is to live, even if for but a flashing event, like a shooting star that burns itself against the black night.”

He could be just as foreign to me as the night sky and its infinite stars and a horizon that could stretch forever unless someone dared to find its boundary. So he defined himself by the very thing he could give a blink of a hope to.

“Sebastian.” He is defined by a name, a means to give a form and presence and purpose to things, to be made as real as anything else.

“Please call to me again, young master.”

**Author's Note:**

> One of my favorite composers is Erik Satie, with his "Gnossienes" being some of my favorite compositions. They have a somber, haunting quality that are made to be played with some sort of abstract sentiment. The sheet music doesn't have a time signature, so it is up to the musician to determine with what form the music must take to serve them.


End file.
